HBAO+ Compatibility Flags Thread

Alright thanks dr_rus, so it might be technically possible via the methods we have, but Nvidia will most likely not release official driver-forced AO flags for DirectX 12 titles. This seems even more so, that Nvidia's focus is on VXAO (looks great in screenshots, but is more performance expensive, which is why it is reserved for the high end cards only 980 and up).

 

Taking into account surface normals doesn't make it automagically better. (BTW HBAO+ does infact use surface normals by looking at the freely available source code on GitHub. Whether the driver version uses it, I don't think it does. )
It's one aspect of advantage. If you are using it with other ENB effects, Then sure, it's probably better to use the built in AO that can interact with other ENB effects.

But.
I've yet to see a single PP Injected form of AO that gets fundamental things correct like even driver HBAO+ can in most cases, that even many of the latest AAA games can't even bother to do.

That alone imo makes it the better trade off.

And Boris, like historically he has. Just comes off as a blowhard.

He acts like we are all a bunch of idiot ignorant kids, when he comes across as the same thing using examples like MLAA and SSAO as marketing driven stuff. When those don't have anything to do with GameWorks.
FXAA was developed to be an another faster alternative to MLAA, which wasn't the first PP based method either. And it was around way before Gameworks was a thing and was never proprietary locked to Nvidia PC GPUs only.

TXAA hasn't been used all that much and never claimed to be the first of it's kind though Temporal AA was rarely used around the time it was first released. (Metal Gear Solid 4 and Devil may Cry 4 on consoles are two earlier examples I can think of ) Even then, it's still pretty different than most TAA methods these days since it uses hardware MSAA as part of the process when most methods just use temporal super sampling reprojection in combination with a basic edge PPAA. And I can still count on one or two hands the number of games that have decent quality TAA.


And if any serious developer can write their own effects better like AA and AO.
Why is it that 9/10 developers still do not do so?

Overwatch, Mirror's Edge 2 and Doom are recently releasing AAA multi gazillion dollar efforts. That are a great example of developers doing a poor job with AO, still stuck with the same fundamental problems that have been around since Crysis nearly a decade ago. (Doom though has great TAA.)

The only one i've seen so far in a released product or otherwise that comes combarable to HBAO+ in fixing the fundamental issues we've had with SSAO in the last decade is SSBC from Ubisoft. DICE made some major improvements with BF3, but seem to have simply stagnated and not striven to fix the remaining problems that have plagued their AO for last 4+ years.

What's the point of his rant? To be another blowhard Gameworks detractor because real men don't take ready to use middleware that are of good quality? (Which is ironic considering he is making the same thing for others to freely implement into any given game)


I don't want to dismiss his work completely and call it crap.(Because despite the over the top usage many people make out of it, a lot of the rest of his work is very good!).
But ENB AO not as good as HBAO+ IMO.
As are the other PP Injected AO methods that have been available the last several years. None of them are perfect including HBAO+ (Dark Souls 1-3 are good examples a problematic title for all these forms of AO since they have to be injected)

 

I don't see why you have to downplay the use of normals as some sort of automagic thing. Even with older titles, like Dragon's Dogma, the generic case of (for instance) a piece of cloth with folds that aren't modelled into the mesh ends up looking very odd without normals taken into account, and is almost as visible as AO showing through fog or transparency effects.
Now that models used in games are detailed enough for such dark creases to stand out and look odd, where shadows are not baked into the diffuse texture for physical accuracy, it's a lot harder to say what's better and what's worse. Mind you, I'm talking solely about injection here - proper HBAO+ is great. (And, I'll note, HBAO+ in FF14's DX11 client is a huge jump over driver-injected HBAO+ usable in the DX9 client.)

As for the rest of your post, it sounds like the point he was making there has flown over your head. Most people are ignorant and happy to listen to marketing and ignore the facts; why do you think there are still people who look for options to "disable HDR" in games? What would be the point of ENBseries implementing Yebis? Fact is, all these middlewares are made to save developers time and effort; it's not a competition to be the prettiest. When it comes to modding, people have the resources to make whatever images they want - they're not artists constrained by deadlines.
Plus, plenty of developers do make their own AO solutions; complaints about them make up a sizeable portion of this thread. But they have different targets to hit than a graphics card manufacturer does, and when it comes down to it they're more concerned with speed, or not disrupting their rendering pipeline, than looking good.
(On a sidenote, he was responding to a guy who kept posting "please add HBAO" in every other topic. If you want to get technical, the point of that rant was probably to shut him up.)

 

Honestly I wouldn't listen to this guy.
HBAO+ is clearly much higher quality than any custom "over the top" SSAO implementation.
I still remember the awful SSAO in GTA IV ENB.
Terrible, just freaking terrible.

I believe he also tried to be the expert regarding DX9 and DX11 AA bits, without really sticking to the facts:
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/544701/geforce-drivers/petition-for-directx-11-anti-aliasing-driver-profiles/post/4611227/#4611227

And the whole PC community should really learn to appreciate NVIDIA GameWorks features and the developer relationships it brings.
Without this most current PC games would suffer both in terms of graphics quality and system compatibility (e.g. VXAO in Rise of the Tomb Raider).
And SLI support would be even worse.

 

The (Master )Guide says DXHR DX11 & HBAO+ is possible with 0x00130000 flag.

But with some further tweaking?
'cause the result with 364.47 is this massive (depth)blurring:



The only minor cure is to scale up the resolution (as for Bloom).....but the heavy blurring is still present.

 

Hehe, that doesn't look very nice indeed
But you originally posted about DX11 HBAO+ in Deus Ex: HR, I believe?
http://forums.guru3d.com/showpost.php?p=5157734&postcount=1789

I don't own this game, so I had no way of knowing about these issues

 

I have it installed it right now and could check to verify. Just need to speed through the intro so I'll get back to you at a later time. I'll grab a screenie from that spot in Adam's home when I get there.

 

Never seen this blurring before. Maybe it's due to some changes in the driver implementation.

 

ENB can be cool for effects and mostly memory usage, but HBAO brings depth to a game like no other can. I mean just look at how drastically better it made Fallout 4 look. A simple implementation and it improved the game by miles. Not to mention the awesome FLEX tech

 

Addendum: the problem seems present where a volumetric light/effect is present, so it's not driver-related......nonetheless it's better to use the in-game SSAO.

 

From top to bottom ingame settings: SSAO and postprocessing, SSAO off, SSAO and postprocessing off.

http://imgur.com/a/2tKu9 DX11 0x00130000
http://imgur.com/a/kfQZT DX9 0x00130000
http://imgur.com/a/dfaAz DX11 default

The flag is not valid for DX11.

 

That flag is only for DX11, but there's some problem involving volumetric lighting.

Maybe it's a good thing to remove the entry in the guide.

 

I don't see that entry?

 

Any flag of the appearance "0x00XY0000" only contains driver AO bits related to DX10 or DX11, and hence can't affect DX9 in any way.
In the same way "0x000000XY" flags will only affect DX8 or DX9.
And I think he is referring to my NVIDIA master thread guide, not the HBAO+ thread:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=392715

BTW, I have now removed the "0x00130000" HBAO+ flag from the "Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut" entry

 

Ah, gotcha.

 

Injected HBAO can look awful too with the right (wrong) settings, and you should know that. Just like that, the AO in ENBseries has various important parameters set by the preset author. I hate to say "it works for me", but I do think your reasoning is a bit lacking.

Also, what's your criterion for that post not sticking to the facts? Everything I've read by actual reputed game developers points in the same direction. To clarify; the forced AA that could be done with DX9 required a level of abstraction that is no longer there. It's like how you can't force AA into modern OpenGL titles. Meanwhile, DX11 allows for a high level of control over the AA resolve process, which would allow for especially high quality even with 4x MSAA - if developers actually bothered to do anything with it. Considering the extra work load involved, there's little doubt that Nvidia sees DSR as their far simpler answer to the DX11 AA question, especially given people's response to TXAA, lack of response to MFAA, and more recently their frothing at the mouth over Quantum Break's reconstruction-through-MSAA tech, to name a few examples.

More on topic - anyone tested with FFX/X-2 Remaster? Still waiting on it to download, but it's supposedly DX11 so those flags ought to work.

 

Several flags seem to work with FFX but the effect is way too strong or just looks stupid on characters

if anyone wants to take a jab at it or find another flag that works better:
0x00110000 (TitanFall)
0x000E0000 (Crysis3_SFRTest, Crysis 3)
0x00090000 (Devil May Cry 4(DX10), Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition, Devil May Cry 4(DX9))
0x00060019 (Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood)


Tried changing some parameters and I can't get rid of the blocky effect, any idea which hex value I should change?

Seems like I have issues getting the lower poly ingame character to look right, maybe. I'm not sure. :/

 

HBAO+ and VXAO are much higher quality in general than some custom ENB SSAO.
But of course depending on the game engine, you might not be able to achieve a decent result with driver forced HBAO+ due to lack of proper AO bits.

Sure, I know very well that DSR is supposed to be the response to the DX11 AA petition.
And its fine, I suppose
But the comment by Boris is still rude and not to the point at all.
It would actually be possible to force hardware AA in DX11 with the right AA bits, I'm very confident of this.

 

When we talk about HBAO and ENB's AO, we're comparing custom SSAO techniques. They are both solutions to the same problem of screen-space ambient occlusion. There's no magic sauce. And injected HBAO can't access game variables like ENB does. So, that's why your reasoning comes off as flawed. And if you want to get technical, Nvidia have graciously released many papers on how HBAO+ works over the years and it isn't a stretch to assume that anyone working with their own AO shaders would go through them.
But VXAO doesn't even belong in the discussion, it's outright superior to all forms of SSAO because it's not a screen-space technique and it can't be injected. If we were talking about using that there'd be no argument, and if we could inject that there'd be no contest.

I don't think you realize that the architecture in the driver needed to support DX11 AA bits would need to be created, and it would have the pitfalls he described. Everything I've seen suggests it would be a far greater undertaking than the bits for DX9. To ask "what games have you worked on" would be crass, but first you say it wasn't factual, and now you say it's rude, and yet you don't say why it isn't the case outside of your conviction. In the end, Nvidia haven't implemented DX11 AA bits and several years of petitioning has done nothing to change it, and that says a lot.

 

DX10 SGSSAA in Hunted: The Demon's Forge ("0x80000F72"):
http://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=8934219&postcount=1403

DX11 SGSSAA in Oil Rush ("0x80000211"):
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/544701/geforce-drivers/petition-for-directx-11-anti-aliasing-driver-profiles/post/3863471/#3863471

So technically forced AA is possible at DX10 or above without graphics glitches, which already disproves your arguments.
But naturally a more "advanced" selection of AA bits is necessary to give trouble-free forced AA in more complicated modern engines.

It is worth the trouble for NVIDIA to implement this at the current time with the presence of native 4K monitors, DSR and ingame TXAA/custom temporal AA modes?
Maybe not, and the performance hit of "true" high quality DX11 SGSSAA would probably be massive in deferred engines like CryEngine, Frostbite, UE4 and so on.
But technically it would be possible, I think.

And regarding driver HBAO+, it certainly has its limitations.
But "0x00000032" still looks great in Skyrim, and beats ENB SSAO hands down IMO.

Boris might be a good programmer, but he really doesn't know what he is talking about regarding driver forced AA and AO